Minimalist Syntax

Glyph syntax rules can be explained using Glyph itself:

section[
@title[Something about Glyph]
txt[
You can use Glyph macros in conjunction
with _Textile_ or _Markdown_ to
produce HTML files effortlessly.
]
p[Alternatively, you can just use em[Glyph itself] to generate HTML tags.]
section[
@title[What about PDFs?]
@id[pdf]
p[
Once you have a single, well-formatted HTML
file, converting it to PDF is
extremely easy with a free 3rd-party
renderer like =>[http://www.princexml.com|Prince]
or =>[http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/|wkhtmltopdf].
]
]
]

The Glyph code above corresponds to the following HTML code:

<div class="section">
<h2 id="h_10">Something about Glyph</h2>
<p>
You can use Glyph macros in conjunction with
<em>Textile</em> or <em>Markdown</em> to
produce HTML files effortlessly.
</p>
<p>
Alternatively, you can just use <em>Glyph itself</em>
to generate HTML tags.
</p>
<div class="section">
<h3 id="pdf">What about PDFs?</h3>
<p>
Once you have a single, well-formatted HTML
file, converting it to PDF is
extremely easy with a free 3rd-party renderer
like <a href="http://www.princexml.com">Prince</a>
or <a href="http://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/\">wkhtmltopdf</a>.
</p>
</div>
</div>

Content Reuse

Finding yourself repeating the same sentence over an over? Glyph allows you to create snippets. Within snippets. Within other snippets (and so on, for a long long time…) as long as you don’t define a snippet by defining itself, which would be kinda nasty (and Glyph would complain!):

If yourself dreaming about parametric snippets, just create your own macros (see the source of Glyph’s changelog, just to have an idea).

Automation of Common Tasks

If you’re writing a book, you shouldn’t have to worry about pagination, headers, footers, table of contents, section numbering or similar. Glyph understands you, and will take care of everything for you (with a little help from CSS3, sometimes).

Reference Validation

Feel free to add plenty of links, snippets, bookmarks, … if Glyph doesn’t find something, it will definitely complain. Broken references are a thing on the past, and you don’t need to worry about it.

Extreme Extensibility

You miss a !!! macro to format really, really important things? Create it. In under 3 seconds, in Ruby or Glyph itself. And yes, you can use special characters, too.

You want your own, very special special glyph create --everything command to create all you need in a Glyph project? You can do it. Using your own Rake tasks, too.

You want Glyph to output ODF files? You can do it, and you’ll be able to run glyph generate -f odf. This would probably require a little more time, but it’s trivial, from a technical point of view.

Convention over Configuration

Put your text files in /text, your images in /images, add custom macros in a macro folder within your /lib folder… you get the picture: Glyph has its special places.